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Tim Hanlon writes "Biofuels continue to lead the field in the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. Besides its use in the transport industry, crude oil is also used to produce conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can be used to produce not only fuel, but also plastics, polyester, and industrial chemicals, cheaply and efficiently."

Trillions of dollars in previous investment and commercial interests will see that doesn't happen for a long time, if ever. I, for one, continue to pay due obeisance and tribute to our vile oil-powered overlords.

That's one reason. The other is the licensing that will come from this revolutionary discovery. Why pay to license a new process/technique/whatever when I already have one that brings in billions of dollars?

If the license is priced right, then they will build it. Speaking of which, the cost per mile is all that matters to consumers. So either tax the oil, or make this stuff cheap. No other choice that I can see. Oh, and don't forget any infrastructure that might need to be modified for this new fuel.

To me the interest here is not in the fuel at all - we can already make electric vehicles and have plenty of renewable energy sources. I have always been more concerned about the plastics situation - just look at how much of the stuff around you right now is made from plastics! So it's nice that they have figured out a way of producing the raw materials they need from renewable resources (waiting a few million years for more oil may be a renewable solution of sorts, but it's not the one I'd personally prefer).

Previous investment will slow down mass adoption, but nonetheless it's good to know more options are becoming available. Especially because we didn't really have that many for plastics as opposed to fuel. Developments like these are the ones that will make us laugh at peak oil in the future and I for one would rather be able to laugh at it than suffer from it.

Could you please describe the micromechanics of exactly how commercial interests will prevent this from happening? Who will speak to who? What will they say? Will they enlist assassins? Will they demand to have it outlawed? On what grounds? If this method can reliably convert a tree into cheap raw material, how will any individual be prevented from starting a company doing this at a small scale?

AC - People with money who back campains and make "donations" to the right places and people - will whisper sweet nothings about how harsh or unproven this is. And the government will some how make it not exactly impossible but just out of reach of being cheaper.

it's like power plants.. allot of them are built on federal land grants (they rent them).. but if you look it's been almost 10 years since a solar plant was given a land grant.

He who has the money makes the rules.. Oil will be here till there lite

sure there is change.. we have a new person in the top slot.. but that person doesn't do everything and it would exceptionally naive to believe it would change the ones that are profiting from the current arrangement.

while sure some top leaders are more blatant about their bias - they are all stuck in the rut.

these people get elected and then do what they want - they will say anything to get there. and only care about staying there.. once there they are set for life - so

Why do "they" "always" mock conspiracy theorists? Because so many of said theorists spew so much garbage. Post a screed with a few dozen "facts", and most people won't be bothered to check every one of them. Some will discount the whole mass, others will accept the whole mass.

Restrictive laws and regulations. Use your imagination and past examples to see how this works. Here's an example from 30 years ago. When solar PV first really became popular, it was a bear to even get a local "permit" to install it, it "didn't pass code". I had friends that personally went through that. Then the electric companies fought it constantly because they didn't want grid tied systems. Their goal is to sell you a product that can never be completely paid off, home generation is a direct threat to that business model. Small scale personal hydroelectric is possible, but it is near impossible to get it permitted, from environmental impact statements to possiblly the endangered three eyed flying newt was spotted ten miles downstream of your proposed little turbine, and so on,etc.. Now we have an alternative liquid biofuels industry with ethanol and biodiesel from traditional sources, as a first transitional step towards unbiquitous renewable liquid fuels, but a lot of interests still don't want it because "it takes food away from poor people" and "drives up costs", "hurts the environment" etc, even though it is the only viable alternative we have at the present for the existing millions and millions of ICE vehicles out there right now, leaving us always walking on eggshells wondering when the next huge price jump will come out of the blue (like it has several times over the past few years) or when the supplies might be disrupted due to some new enlarged wars in the middle east or whatever.

Look at computer software and the introduction of FOSS for another example, we are all aware of how it has been fought against at some lofty levels, and how they went about it, we've discussed that a lot here. Heck, back to vehicle, electric cars are buildable, they were just as common as any other vehicle a century ago, and we've had examples in the more recent past such as the EV1, and people *begged* to buy them, they loved them, yet they were recalled and crushed. They worked too good, they were a threat. There's a movie about it. That's why you have seen all these big car companies try to foist off those ludicrously expensive "hydrogen fuel cell cars" with small numbers of prototypes instead of just building at least some electric cars in mass quantities starting years ago. They can look like they are doing something while actually delaying tech that could be on the market. Guess who owns the patents on building large NiMH batteries, the ones we could have been using since the early 90s for electric cars and are still priced way too high to be really well adopted?

When you are talking about *disruptive technologies* and their economic impact, there is always an element of resistance from those older entrenched industries and concerns who could see their bottom line impacted negatively. They will spend what it takes (in both money and effort) overtly or covertly to at least delay and make adoption of the newer or better tech more complicated and expensive then it needs to be.

Photovoltaics in the past decade are just finally getting to mass production scales where the costs drop fast. When they were first introduced, they cost over 10 grand a small inefficient panel and were used primarily in space missions.

Economies of scale *work*, you don't have affordable PV yet because of resistance to it from the entrenched energy monopolies and because the solar makers had to make do with leftover bad/scrap silicon wafers from the chip industries. New fabs dedicated to just PV production

Oil companies don't sell oil - they sell energy. Oil is just how they get the energy to you. It's a transport medium and nothing more.

If you give them something that does the job better (which is to say, with a higher profit margin) they'll be all over it.

That's why discoveries like this are great, even if financially unfeasible right now. It sets a ceiling. If gas jumps to 3 or 4 or 5 dollars a gallon, eventually other technologies will be competitive.

It's like telling the oil bearing countries, "We've drawn a line - right here. See it? Cross it and we'll switch technologies."

It's always nice to have alternatives. And it's even better to let the people you buy from know that you have alternatives, so they better watch it.

if energy companies can put it in a pump and sell it alongside cigarettes,beer, and condoms they will sell it. if someone discovered how to make ethanol from cellulose in unlimited quantities for 50 cents a gallon and the oil companies could sell it for $1.25 a gallon, oil companies would happily sell it. "drill,drill,drill" is about having control of supply. If supply is cheap and guarunteed, then drilling no longer matters

I read this article about the railroad companies around the late 1800's that basically said they forgot what business they were in. They made the mistake of thinking they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, and that's why they missed the significance of the automobile and in a short period of time went from being the overlords of America (in many ways) to a struggling industry that required government bailout to stay afloat.

This is the kind of thing that could very likely happen to the oil industry. A couple of guys in a lab somewhere suddenly came up with a cheap and easy way to turn plant matter into gasoline and plastic. The process runs at 120C and is about 50% efficient. Those are damn good numbers, especially for a first pass. That's not a lot of input energy, and 60% and 70% efficiency aren't too far away I'd guess. Maybe more.

Oil companies don't sell oil - they sell energy. Oil is just how they get the energy to you. It's a transport medium and nothing more.

I'd argue the oil companies don't like the fact that oil comes from nations that don't play nice with them on their terms and would jump for joy if they found an alternative if they could get full control over it.

If you give them something that does the job better (which is to say, with a higher profit margin) they'll be all over it.

However, oil companies have a vast investment in oil infrastructure, technology and expertise which give them a significant advantage over potential competitors when it comes to delivering oil at a profit. They do not have an advantage at delivering plastic trees. As a result, they are not quite as unbiased as you imply with regard to the exact form in which energy is delivered to the customer.

If you give them something that does the job better (which is to say, with a higher profit margin) they'll be all over it.

That's not an accurate statement at all.

If you give them something that does the job better, with minimum capitol investment, a captive customer base, control over supply, demand, and pricing, with both government subsidies and federal tax credits, they'll be all over it.

Keep in mind, contrary to popular myth, oil does not participate in free market pricing nor does gas. Furthermore, pr

You'd be surprised that biofuels is the one renewable energy source a lot of traditional oil companies are interested in.

The oil distribution network, existing liquid fuel infrastructure and refineries for the trans-esterification or Fischer-Tropsch processes used to convert biomass to biofuels means that much of their technology is still relevant, as opposed to complete obsoletion by electric vehicles etc.

Further, having biofuels lets you use blends of conventional oil and biofuel giving the oil majors a c

not to be a conspiracy nut or anything but i completely agree with you.

So I've read Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary" a couple of times. It's a humorous work, if a bit dated. This isn't a "Devil's Dictionary" but here is my own contribution because there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding this basic issue.

"Conspiracy nut", n. - 1. A term used by an opponent in an argument in order to shut down certain occurrences of debate. Often used as a substitute for having any sort of valid basis for dissent. The preferred technique when said opponent has no evidence or logic by which he can disagree but does have a strong dislike of whatever is being said and wishes to end the discussion, or at least cause it to degenerate into a contest, by any means available.
2. Advocate of theories involving conspiracies, typically of the "smoky back room" type as opposed to the "business and government collusion" or "power behind the throne" type, most noted for the total lack of any evidence or reasoning behind them. This type of conspiracy nut does exist, which enables the intellectually dishonest to ignore conspiracy nuts fitting definition (1) and lump them together with the conspiracy nuts fitting definition (2), again as a means of shutting down debate (see: "argumentation", "intellectual honesty" and "propaganda techniques").

"Common sense", n. - the self-evident realization, easily supported by relatively small amounts of personal research and investigation into the matter, that a very small number of people control the world and that the general public is largely ignorant of this fact. The willingness to face this reality despite the insulting nature of those who do not want to accept it and will use all manner of personal attacks, logical fallacies, or dismissal without examination while congratulating themselves on their levelheadedness (see: "denial"). Said control is exerted primarily by means of media, propaganda, and the creation or manipulation of fiat currencies throughout the world.

If all the arable land in all the world were used to grow the highest yield plant for biofuel, it wouldn't come CLOSE to what we need for fuel, or our plastic demand. Hell, it might not even be a need to support the polyester demand...should the 70's happen again.

I am an industrial chemist in an immediately related project. I do think the discovery is important, but I don't see the point of converting prime cellulose to fuel, because that's sort of missing the point. Currently cellulose has plenty of uses; it is being used widely as is in things like paper, paper tissues, cardboard, viscose fibres and cellophan. The fact is that only 20% of the Earth's land area outside the polar regions is in a natural state. The rest is in human use somehow. We'd need to cut down energy consumption severely and improve the efficiency of current technology to live with 100% renewables only.

Most of plant matter is not prime-quality cellulose, and there is a major research effort underway to evaluate the uses of the rest of the plant. For example, the second-largest constituent of wood, lignin, has been up to this point only burned to regenerate pulping chemicals and produce energy for the pulp mill.

The discovery is important in the sense that first, it provides information of the catalysis on cellulose, and second, annual plants or other more difficult sources than wood could be used for producing plastics and liquid fuels. Then again, we have to consider the alternative of using oil for plastic: it's not really that bad environmentally to take oil and then convert it into solid plastic, because the carbon it contains is sequestered into the landfill. Liquid fuels from this source would compete with other land plant sources or e.g. algae that produce oils (either triglyceride or terpenes that can be converted with hydrocracking).

I read the article in Applied Catalysis A itself, and found it fairly impressive. The system is truly catalytic, there are no impossible stoichiometric (in this case about 100 g chromium or 220 g chromium chloride per 100 g cellulose) non-regenerable reactants so common in the "alternative fuel" literature. They needed only 0.5%. I see only one major problem in it: chromium. It is being increasingly avoided because it can form carcinogenic compounds. You can distil off the furfural, but you can't distil sugars, so you'll have to deal with the residual chromium somehow. Probably a simple ion exchange could be used.

Damnit. You already said exactly what I was thinking, but in one compact sentence.:)

I think, when we can turn sand and iron (or similar abundant materials) into something plasticlike, by using a plant that only needs electricity from sun, and maybe other things that are made from these materials... And a process that recycles 100% of it... Then we have got a sustainable cycle that can work even on tomorrow's overpopulated world.

I know that here in Florida we have a few plants that we in Forestry researched called Titi and saw palmetto.

These plants grow fast in mass groves and were viable candidates for biofuel. Alas the biofuel plant was nixed.

Though it provided green jobs, an alternate fuel source, environmental karma and would aid us in the fight against overgrown ground fuel for wildfires the community voted against the smell the plant would cause.

The oil won't last forever so people need to wake up. Even though I burn trees

Copaiba [wikipedia.org] is a tree from the Amazon region that gives diesel oil. Drill a hole in the tree and pour the oil that comes out in your tank, that is all you need to do. Typical yield is 40 liter per tree every year.

That's hardly "diesel oil" any more than other forms of vegetable oil are "diesel oil".
It still needs to be converted to biodiesel to be safe for long-term use in a diesel engine.
Of course it simplifies the oil extraction process greatly (usually done by pressing).
You're going to get a lot of impurities (like water!) if you do what you suggest, too.

It still needs to be converted to biodiesel to be safe for long-term use in a diesel engine

Googling for more data on this, I found at least one article [acs.org] that claims otherwise: "... copaiba (Copaifera Langsdorfii) has raised the possibility of eliminating even the processing step. The copaiba produces at least 20-30 liters of oil every six months -- and this oil is a mixture of 15-carbon hydrocarbons which can be used directly to power a diesel engine"

Reading between the lines, I theorize that they really mean "which could possibly be used to directly power some form of theoretical diesel engine that does not yet exist, but could be built, although it may not be as clean or efficient."

I don't think they mean that an existing engine would work with it. Can't be sure though.

Those are far from the "only" problems... they are the easiest problems to detect. There are countless forums on the Internet that discuss all the finer points of running veg oil in diesel engines... use google if you want to find them to read all the nitty gritty details.
General consensus is that running unprocessed veg oil most diesel engines will lead to coking over time, unless you heat the veg oil first.
If you aren't extremely careful to remove all water from the oil, you can wear out the cylinder walls very quickly, too... and won't necessarily even notice a degradation in performance until it's too late.
There are other problems that apply to specific models of diesel engines, too--you can't even run biodiesel in an '09 model year Volkswagen TDI engine without serious problems; I wouldn't even dream of trying straight VO.

Practically any veg oil *can* be used directly to power a diesel engine. But most diesel engines are not designed with such oils in mind, and therefor do not work well for extended periods of time with such oils. You risk damaging your engine if you run unmodified vegetable oil in most unmodified engines. This has been known for a century or so.

You do not need to crack vegetable oil for long term use in a Diesel engine. There are several *types* of Diesel engines out there. Indirect injection engines with linear injector pumps work absolutely fine with natural vegetable oil, and they'd work just fine with copaiba tree oil. If you're worried about impurities, sump your tank to get rid of any heavy junk and water. Its easy and takes less than a minute. Well designed Diesel powered cars have excellent fuel filtration systems. My Mercedes 300

Like any other vegetable oil, the oil derived from Copiaba has to be processed using Transesterification [wikipedia.org] to be useful as a fuel. Though the process is not difficult or costly, there's more to it than just dumping the raw oil in your fuel tank.

As I already posted above, copaiba oil is remarkable exactly because, unlike other vegetable oils, it needs no further processing to be used as fuel.

Copaiba's main limitation is that it requires Amazon region climate, warm temperatures and abundant rainfall all year long. However, a researcher in Colorado [biodieselmagazine.com] is trying to insert the oil producing gene from copaiba into grasses. This could have a very interesting use, if it could be used with plants such as wild grasses that grow in regions unsuitable for growing food plants.

The first issue needs to be reduction. We use too much stuff. Period. The second issue is finding substitutes. If we start with step two it won't any good what so ever. If I eat too many Twinkies and I switch to whole wheat bread and organic butter, but I don't eat less, it's not a net change. If I eat fewer Twinkies then I'm better off.

The catch is that the process costs more per barrel than just hoovering the stuff up out of the ground. Until it becomes cheaper, it's a non-starter, now matter how many dollars are thrown at the problem.

Pop reference you can check out: "It's a Wonder Life" - the flash-back scene where the lead charactor's friend tells me "there's a great investment oppertunity with Soy farmers, they're going to make plastics!" - or something like that.

Mr Tupper (Tupperware fame) made it big by using fuel refinement waste to make plastics - there by removing the bottleneck of growing Soy.

The article reports the ground-breaking/unprecedented/whatever direct conversion of cellulose to HMF. Here's an earlier article from a different research group that the editors of "Gizmag" seem to be unaware of. It was published earlier and actually describes the same process from either cellulose or untreated biomass:

I'm ready for the home inventor plastic making machines. Stuff your grass, shrub, and tree cuttings in one end and pull your invention out of the other. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing [wikipedia.org]

This isn't exactly new technology, it's already proven that oil and plastic (as well as paper, high-durability concrete, etc) can be made from hemp. The only problem with hemp is that it's illegal to grow it in the US because it looks too much like Marijuana, and is therefore controlled by the DEA, despite the fact that you can smoke all the hemp you can handle and still not even get a buzz.

Plants don't come from nowhere. They suck up chemical energy from the environment and electromagnetic radiation from the sun, both of which could be put to far better use than making more Buzz Lightyear dolls.

Biomass technologies are just a process, and cannot be used as a source of mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy (which is essentially what complex plastic represent; the ones we have at the moment are the result of energy applied by the Earth itself for millions of years). Just like the touted 'hydrogen economy' - it just shifts the problem to someone else.

These biomass technologies will, unless they are only used in energy-intensive artificial environments, displace food production and starve people. So yeah, we can have plastics without crude oil - but they will be like soylent green; made of people!

Not to mention the energy costs. I wonder how much oil energy it takes to create a pound of plastic or biofuel. Would it cost less oil energy to just make the plastic or fuel from oil? That's the problem with ethanol, it takes a crazy amount of oil to grow corn (in worst case scenarios: 2 calories of oil energy for 1 of corn energy in fertilizer and pesticides and other stuff), then the wet milling takes another crazy amount (ignoring the energy costs to GROW corn, it takes like 6 gallons of oil energy to create 8 gallons of ethanol energy).

Simply coming up with a product that doesn't take oil in as a raw product doesn't mean that the process doesn't use any oil.

It probably doesn't, but oil is the predominant form of energy right now, and until oil is replaced, this process will take oil. Sure they can set up a plant to take energy from a wind farm, but unless they built the farm, that energy would have reduced oil energy use elsewhere.

Well you have to grow the crops to create the biomass, no? That requires things like herbicides (potentially not required if the weeds are just as useful as the crop) and pesticides. It also requires harvesting in some fashion. All that is currently accomplished (except on not-so-useful small scales) via tractors. Tractors use gasoline or diesel. Currently (citation likely needed, but I can't remember where I read it) biofuels are being slammed because of the fact that it takes more fuel to grow and process the biomass than is actually recovered from the biomass as biofuel to begin with.

I would put forth that the absolute dollar cost is not really the issue, it's the ratio of energy in vs. energy out that is.

Of course, that's also ignoring the amount of arable land required to grow that biomass - use too much land and suddenly the cost of crops that could otherwise be grown there increases.

Soy based biofuels are many times more efficient than corn... and Algae based biofuels are even more efficient than those! It's not a small number either; something like 20x more efficient. (Can't give exact numbers; don't remember how much exactly)

Ethanol is only inferior if you are only judging it based on mpg. Ethanol is a high octane fuel (usually between 110 & 130 octane). So if you have an engine designed to use ethanol (and take advantage of the extra octane) you are going to get more power. If you need that extra power it makes ethanol well worth it.

If/When they start offering ethanol from plant sources that don't "waste" farmland I think even losing the few mpg will only be a minor drawback to using it.

Furthermore, because of the high octane and increased power, you can use a smaller displacement engine, which will off set the increase in MPG while increasing the overall efficiency.

The higher the compression ratio in a combustion engine, the more efficient it is. The problem is with these so called flex fuel cars, which are low compression and high displacement originally designed for gasoline, now being fueled by ethanol. Sure it works, but its completely inefficient.

The higher the compression ratio in a combustion engine, the more efficient it is.

They are also much less reliable. I fly piston engine powered aircraft, the kind that *require* 100 octane fueld, and can assure you that the high compression engines are much worse for the wear at overhaul than the lower compression ones. Sure, you can just make the parts thicker to withstand the abuse but the cost to manufacture goes up as does vehicle weight. There is still no such thing as a free lunch, even if it is biofuel powered.

Y'see. Most of our fertilizers and pesticides are produced using fossil fuels. The Haber-Bosch process for example.

Which means that when the fossil fuels run out, so will the food.

What is the EROEI on making bio fuels to produce fertilizers to produce bio fuels? Is it even above 1? And how will the cost of food compare against the cost of a tank of gas in that environment? Should we encourage people to starve to feed the Hummer?

More seriously, though, we already produce way more than we consume, even taking account obesity figures for US citizens. I don't think the US itself would have a problem with food, though we may not like it.

Most of our fertilizers and pesticides are produced using fossil fuels

Manure was used as fertilizer before they invented the Haber-Bosch process. There's one tropical plant, the Brazilian water hyacinth [wikipedia.org], that's considered one of the world's worst weeds [issg.org]. It doubles its mass in six to eighteen days, probably the fastest growing plant in the world. One hectare produces up to 750 kg of dry organic matter per day.

The ideal biomass production scheme? Grow water hyacinth in ponds of untreated sewage. Make cellulosic ethanol from that, or else just burn the biomass to power steam turbines.

Manure was used as fertilizer before they invented the Haber-Bosch process.

Manure is still used as fertilizer even after they invented the Haber-Bosch process. The population of the world was much lower before they invented the Haber-Bosch process. There were 90 million Americans in 1909. You're only hoping for a 2/3, 200 million die off then?

Nitrogen fertilizers have allowed us to increase the carrying capacity of the land... Without them, we have rather too many people.

The ideal biomass production scheme? Grow water hyacinth in ponds of untreated sewage. Make cellulosic ethanol from that, or else just burn the biomass to power steam turbines.

You're making a choice between food and energy again. Do you put the sewage on the land to increase consumable

Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can not only be used to produce fuel, but also plastics, polyester and industrial chemicals cheaply and efficiently.

First of all, trees might not be the best source of cellulose. Other plant types are probably better, in terms of the amount of cellulose yield per acre per year (things like switchgrass, bamboo, hemp, etc which grow faster and denser).

Such an industry will, of necessity, be growing large quantities of these plants, which will be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and freeing up oxygen. Yes, we should still work on protecting rainforests and other wild areas - we shouldn't need to cut/burn down all the ra

Why not cut out the middle man and ask them to find a way to turn sand directly into high strength flexible glass instead of the weak rigid stuff we currently have? As you say, we have lots of sand. So just get some chemists, buy them some coffee, and this weekend they can bang out the designs for Ultraglass (tm) light, flexible, and easy to work as wood, strong as steel, biodegradable as wood, too...hey, sounds like wood has almost all the properties you want. Screw the chemists, just find a biology